WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI is unusual among post-war European composers in attempting to adapt the acerbity of modernism to symphonic thought.

Modernism, particularly as practised after the traumatic experience of World War II, often concerned itself with fragmentation, rejection of tradition and a resistance to wholeness and affirmation, things that were so often the pillars of symphonic writing.

In this context, the Sydney Symphony's cogent reading of Lutoslawski's Fourth Symphony under conductor Mark Wigglesworth highlighted the depth of this achievement, building an imposing and carefully structured edifice that keeps reinventing itself from a few unifying ideas, without having recourse to repetition or the stuff of convention.

Its dark opening presents coloured strands and flashes in the upper pitches which gradually emerge over a heavy, slowly pulsating textural bed from the lower strings.

The work unfolds with a compelling sense of shape towards two emphatic climaxes and ends with a remarkable duet for two violins which gradually unravels the material already heard, before a short, powerful coda.

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It was welcome to hear a late 20th-century work in one of the Sydney Symphony's mainstream concert series. In recent years, more adventurous programming has tended to be quarantined in concerts targeted at the young.

The program then turned to the wellsprings of unified wholeness with a brilliantly lucid performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, K.467 by Stephen Hough.

His playing glowed with clarity, lyrical precision and discreet virtuosity in the first movement, overflowing in the cadenza with a joyous flowering of textural complexity. The famous slow movement was poised and not unduly drawn out, and the finale was brisk, cheeky and impetuous.

For an encore, Hough played a gem of his own devising - a transcription of a song, Crepuscule, by Massenet, which was a delicate study in the colours of quietness.

Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95 From the New World after interval was notable for its focus and structural strength. Wigglesworth maintained continuity and a comely balance of lyricism and power, sustaining the tempo's freshness and lapsing neither into excessive languor in the slow movement nor bombast in the last.